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I’ve been back in Adelaide for eight months now and good things are happening. I’ve moved from working in emergency services to environmental governance. I’m still doing some public speaking, for example being on a panel for the Australian Conservation Foundation’s preview screening of An Inconvenient Sequel this week.

I’m doing my final PhD revisions, following positive reviews. I’ve completed yoga teacher training, which has deepened my practice – but I won’t commit to any teaching until I graduate from my PhD! That’s my priority right now.

Adelaide is one of the world’s most livable cities. South Australia is on track to have the world’s largest battery for storing renewable energy from solar and wind power. My family are here. However as Paul Kelly has said, you have to leave Adelaide to appreciate it.

I’ve returned to my home city of Adelaide to work in emergency services, building on my international experience in disaster response and risk reduction, as well as postgraduate studies in health promotion and science communication. I’m doing communications work for the CFS, South Australia’s community-based fire, rescue and emergency service. Also the agency with what I think are the best emergency planning & response maps in the state!

I was anticipating trading cyclone season in Vanuatu for bushfire season in Australia, though it’s not been such a clear trade. While I have been responding to plenty of bushfires, I’ve also been responding to floods and storm damage, which brings to my mind this famous Australian poem I learnt in primary school.

Working for the CFS is my first role directly in government, which has involved training in emergency response protocols and operational duties in emergency situations. I’ve also been trained as a firefighter! I’ve enjoyed learning more about the physics of water pumps and climate science of bushfires. Given the CFS depends on the work of more than 13,000 volunteer emergency responders, this role builds on my experience working with volunteers and training in psychological first aid.

Last month I also popped over to the US capital city of Washington to participate in OpenCon, thanks to a travel grant from the Wikimedia Foundation and SPARC. It was a long trip, but turned out to be worthwhile for meeting so many inspiring people and participating in new projects like the beta of SocArxiv.

Who knew that my experiences in science communication, technology, media, human rights, sustainable development and participatory theatre would combine for an assignment in the South Pacific?

Last month I arrived in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, to be a digital trainer with Wan Smolbag Theatre. Wan Smolbag is core funded by Oxfam, NZ Aid and Australian Aid. It began more than 25 years ago touring Pacific islands with one small bag of costumes, making participatory theatre for health promotion. It has expanded massively, now also coordinating a turtle monitoring network, reproductive health clinics, youth and nutrition centres, sports programs, disaster preparedness, health and environment resources and waste management projects.

It’s refreshing getting back into grassroots development after my work in Melbourne and Geneva over the past couple of years. It’s also fantastic to enjoy life by the ocean again – during high school I worked at my local surf shop. Vanuatu’s opportunities for surfing, kayaking and diving as well as fantastic tropical fruits make it a place I’m happy to live.

I’m continuing to do research and writing in science communication and health promotion with universities in Australia. I’m aiming to do digital training here related to a range of organizations I’ve been involved with in the past, including OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia and Mozilla. Firstly though I’m focused on local needs and interests. For example, I’m helping with World Oceans Day activities next week. This week I’m travelling around the island of Efate documenting Healthforce, the health promotion theatre group, and Rainbow disability theatre. Most digital work I’m supporting at the moment is making publications including comic books and posters about health and environmental issues, written in Bislama and focused on visual communication for island communities.

Somehow I’m now embedded in life at the University of Melbourne despite subsisting, like many early career researchers, on a variety of tenuous contracts. I am learning about course coordination and teaching from the inspiring Kathryn Williams tutoring the Masters course Interdisciplinarity and the Environment, as well as tutoring an undergraduate course in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. Academic teaching is relatively new for me so I’m investing a lot of time and energy in this learning.

All of this has left me little time for creative projects outside of academia, though I have been fitting in training with Impro Melbourne and performing at Club Voltaire occasionally. I also presented at Laborastory on Mabo Day, and celebrated the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland at Carlton Connect. My next comedy show is likely to be around Halloween.

One in four laptops given for free by the government of Uruguay to all public school students two years ago is either broken, under repair, stolen or has crashed, according to an official report published in July.

In 2008 Uruguay was the first country in the world to implement the One Laptop Per Child program, created by US scientist Nicholas Negroponte.

The program aimed to provide every child in the developing world with a laptop for educational purposes, at an affordable price.

With this objective the Uruguayan government created ‘Plan Ceibal’, which between 2008-2009 gave laptops to 380,000 children between 6 and 12 years of age who were enrolled in the country’s public schools.

Now the government has completed a survey to check the condition of the laptops, which has found that 27.4 percent are out of operation for different reasons.

According to the survey 14.2 percent of the laptops are broken; 6.2 percent are being repaired; 3.9 percent are frozen or crashed; one percent have been stolen; and the states of 3.1 percent are unknown.

In the country’s interior, where the laptops were first distributed in 2008, 29.9 percent of the laptops aren’t working. In Montevideo, the capital, 19.6 percent aren’t working, but children there received the laptops a year later in 2009.

The percentage of broken laptops in poor areas is higher, where only 66.3 percent are working. In more favourable environments the percentage reaches 83.5 percent.

“A significant number of faults were expected, but not this many. This discovery means that we’re revising aspects of the plan’s operation and coming up with measures to lower that number,” Fernando Brum, director of Plan Ceibal, told SciDev.Net.

Among the measures include a call centre to help users with broken laptops, mobile repair services to work in schools, and ways to reduce the cost of repairs.

Workshops for parents and teachers on how to look after the laptops have also been organised.

“We should keep in mind that 2010 is the first year that Plan Ceibal is operating across the whole country. We’re still gaining experience and problem solving; reducing the number of laptops that are out of service is one of our primary objectives,” concluded Brum.

This is my translation of a story written by Daniela Hirschfeld on the Science and Development Network, “Uruguay: cuarta parte de portátiles del OLPC no funciona”, published on August 11, 2010.You can read the original in Spanish here.

SciDev.Net stories are published under a Creative Commons attribution license; my translation is available under the same license. Note this license is only for this page. Other works on this website are subject to other licenses; please contact me for details if you’d like to republish other parts of this site.